GamingBolt: Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions (Single Player)

GB: "Does Mass Effect 3 manage to do the impossible and improve upon its predecessor? Has the gameplay been improved drastically? And if so, has it been done for the better? How’s the story going to be, and how will BioWare tie off so many lose ends in one game? These are just some of the questions all BioWare and Mass Effect fans have right now. Obviously, all of them weren’t answered with the demo, but I did get to see a taste of what the final game will be like."

Don't kill me but the demo didn't really wow me. I hope the lack of options in dialogue (nice guy or mean guy) and the fact that the character creation is insanely scaled back were just due to the fact that this is a demo. Another problem with the character creation was that even though I tried to recreate my skinny slick looking Sheperd, making his neck as thin as possible etc, he still wound up looking like Russell Crowe borrowing Henry Rollins' neck. It's like the game has decided that I can't be my sleazy Cesare Romero looking character anymore because he's too far removed from the typical gruff action douche the game wants me to be.

Also, was it just my copy or did anyone feel like the framerate was very low? I was playing on PS3 and the framerate seemed to be a steady 10 fps with lots of little glitchy shadows and jerky cuts in cutscenes. I'm wondering if something just messed up with my download and am gonna try it again but even aside from that I felt the graphics looked a little worse than ME2.

The whole thing did nothing to convince me that they're not trying to turn this franchise into Uncharted 2. In fact it made me a little worried they're actually turning it into Dragon age 2.

The dialogue options were cut down by BioWare on purpose, since this is a demo. ME3 has over 40,000 lines of dialogue, so you need to worry about that. :P

As for the framerate hang ups, I think that's just your system, because the demo ran like a dream on my Xbox 360, both in SP and MP. There were a few glitchy shadows, but I guess we can attribute that to the fact that this is an early build, and the technical hiccups will be fixed in the final version of the game.